Stay architecturally enlightened!

in-ground uplight suggestions?

Has anyone had a happy experience with installing and maintaining in-ground uplights in a public project? My only experiences with them have involved lots of leaking, cracked lenses, and replacement costs.

These will be in grass, but we can put them in small concrete cast in place sleeves if need be.

Hm, Archinect, maybe we need a category for threads called "Construction"? I'll put this under Professional Practice for now.

We have in-ground uplights in our 7 or 8 year old university architecture building and they seem to be perfectly fine, but they are covered by a cantilevered portion of the building, away from rain, pedestrians, and evil lawnmowers. Any other experience I've had with in-ground uplights has been less than satisfactory...

this seems relevant. i don't love them though. i suppose you could place them such that you encourage alternative pedestrian routes to minimize wearing them down. also, i would imagine that they would be, for some time, guaranteed against leakage and inherent defects though not against damage.

We used Hunza lights at a project let's see, about 2005 and I haven't heard of them failing; I can check with the owner. They are *very* high-end though, but we thought it was worth the investment for a variety of reasons. One, they were the nicest-looking we could find, and two, they were the highest quality (as best as we could tell) that we found. Also they have a variety of options & offer some of the smallest diameters for in-pavement I could find. I did fairly extensive research at the time.

You know, I really do want to check to see how they're holding up, because let me tell you, those are some BEAUTIFUL lights. Now that I'm looking through their catalogue and remembering - I remember when we put them into the patio and turned them on for the first time, I was SO pleased - they look absolutely lovely - perfectly classy, completely CRISP modern and give great light. They are so solid you can't imagine them ever cracking in a million years. Extremely beautiful products, down to the detailing. If I recall correctly I had trouble finding the small diameter I wanted, and I remember wanting a very modern trim ring, and they had the total package.